{{distinguish, Drive bay
Device Bay was a standard jointly developed by
Compaq
Compaq Computer Corporation (sometimes abbreviated to CQ prior to a 2007 rebranding) was an American information technology company founded in 1982 that developed, sold, and supported computers and related products and services. Compaq produced ...
,
Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...
and
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...
in 1997, as a simple way to add, remove, and share hardware devices. Originally intended to be introduced in the second half of 1998, Device Bay was never finalized and has long since been abandoned. The official website disappeared in mid-2001.
Making use of new technologies at the time, such as
USB
Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard that establishes specifications for cables, connectors and protocols for connection, communication and power supply (interfacing) between computers, peripherals and other computers. A broad ...
and
FireWire
IEEE 1394 is an interface standard for a serial bus for high-speed communications and isochronous real-time data transfer. It was developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s by Apple in cooperation with a number of companies, primarily Sony an ...
, Device Bay was intended to make adding and removing devices from the PC easier, through the use of plug-n-play. It allowed peripherals such as hard drives, CD/DVD-ROM drives, audio devices, and modems, to be added to the PC without having to open the case or even turn the PC off. Devices could also be removed from the PC while it was still turned on; this could also be done through software in the operating system. Another advantage of Device Bay was that it allowed certain devices to be swapped between a desktop and laptop computer.
HP released a line on PCs that uses the idea of device bay to expand the personal storage on a personal computer and marketed them as "HP Personal Media Drives". These Drives/Bays are primarily available on the HP Media Center PCs.